


the bandit and the songbird

by anabel



Category: Original Work
Genre: Eloping, F/F, Presumed Dead, masquerades
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 00:12:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5948494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anabel/pseuds/anabel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If she had really been the Dorset Bandit, Elizabeth thought, looking out over the crowded ballroom awash in a laughing glittering crush of dancers, she could have absconded with a queen’s ransom any time in the last hour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the bandit and the songbird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CherishedPassion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherishedPassion/gifts).



There was an itch high on Elizabeth’s back. Just out of reach, even if she had dared try to scratch it – and with her mother the Countess in the room, she certainly daren’t. She bit the inside of her lip instead, trying to distract herself, but kept her face serene.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t go,” she said, keeping her eyes meekly on the floor. Jasper was curled indolently by the fire, the very picture of a contented hound, and she wished she could curl up with him. Life would be so much easier if she was Jasper.

Her mother raised an eyebrow. “Are you feeling ill?”

Now that would put the cat among the canaries. Sherborne was expecting to see his fiancé at the masquerade tonight; he was the one who had suggested she come as the famous Dorset Bandit, the highwaywoman who had been terrorizing the titled and wealthy these six months gone. Elizabeth privately thought that he just wanted to see her hair down; but to tell her mother that would have been seen as impertinence. The Countess would not have forgotten how difficult it had been to persuade Elizabeth to accept the match with Sherborne in the first place, or how much she had resisted her parents’ wise matchmaking. Any renewal of obstinacy at this late juncture would call down a storm upon her head.

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I am well.”

Her mother’s face smoothed, and she was once again the regal beauty who had charmed an Earl in her own youth, and given her such hopes for her daughter’s prospects. “Then of course you should go, my dear. It is hardly a night to miss! Sherborne has sent you a rose: see, it looks lovely in your hair.”

Elizabeth knew she was beautiful. The bandit costume had been created by the best dressmaker in the county, and it fit her perfectly; she thought a bandit would probably dress like a man, not in a skirt and corset, but she did like the cape they had given her. And her hair cascaded down her back in a wealth of falling curls, equally gorgeous and impractical.

All of it made her feel like she was being sold, like a horse at auction.

She raised her mask to her eyes. 

*~*

If she had really been the Dorset Bandit, Elizabeth thought, looking out over the crowded ballroom awash in a laughing glittering crush of dancers, she could have absconded with a queen’s ransom any time in the last hour. She could think of at least five ways to part a lady from her jewels, and once parted, there was far too great a crowd for an effective pursuit or search. She could have ducked into any number of hidey-holes to change (this being the house of her childhood best friend, she knew at least a dozen), and melted into the crowd and out the door. 

Unfortunately she was not the Dorset Bandit. This wasn’t even Dorset; it was London, and the most criminal Elizabeth was capable of being at present was hiding in a shadowed corner after dancing with her betrothed only twice. 

She was sure that Sherborne had good qualities. He was titled, and wealthy; they told her that he had excellent prospects in the Lords; and he was accounted quite a good hunter. He wasn’t even that much older than her – only thirty-nine to her nineteen – and still cut a dashing figure on the dance floor. Nor was the matter of succession one of crushing immediacy, as he already had a son from his first marriage. He was respected and courteous, and she could find nothing about him to advance against her parents’ wishes.

And yet when he looked at her, her skin crawled. She could not imagine being his wife, forced to bed with him whenever he wished, forced to smile at his side for the rest of her life. She had never dreamed of being a Duchess, of leading society, however much her mother had dreamed it for her. She could still remember her own childhood dreams, plotted out in the nursery of this very house, her partner-in-crime Betty by her side: traveling the world, not just to Paris and Vienna and Rome, but to far-off Moscow and India and Barbary; climbing mountains and riding camels and exploring new unmapped parts of the globe; writing romances by the campfire, as lurid as any she and Betty had stolen from under Betty’s older sister Polly’s mattress.

If she closed her eyes, she could almost smell Eastern perfume, or the tang of sea air.

But Betty had died three years ago, thrown from her horse while riding, and Elizabeth was marrying Sherborne in less than a month.

“Excuse me.”

Elizabeth opened her eyes, surprised to find that she had closed them. 

It was Polly – or Lady Portland, as she now was. Despite her mask, her pregnancy rounded her Queen Guinevere costume out and made her unmistakeable. “Your mother asked me to find you,” she said, putting a supportive hand to the small of her back. “She said she’d wait for you in the library.”

After thanking her, Elizabeth ducked out of the ballroom. What her mother could want, she wasn’t sure – although perhaps it was only to scold her for not paying enough attention to Sherborne. She had danced with him twice, and smiled at his bad jokes, and not flinched when he touched her hair… surely she had done enough. But the Countess might not think so. She steeled herself as she slipped inside the half-open library door.

For a moment, she didn’t see anyone in the room, but then her eyes adjusted to the dim light and she made out a figure sitting in the bay window. 

Her heart leapt into her throat. Her mother had been wearing a tiara, and a long heavy gown – this figure was tall and slim, wearing breeches. It was too dark to make out features, but was it Sherborne? Did he think to attempt her virginity, to make it impossible for her to back out? She stumbled backwards, reaching for the handle of the door, as the figure in the window leapt athletically to its feet. 

“Please, my lord, let us rejoin the others,” Elizabeth said, her heart in her mouth. 

“Beth.”

Elizabeth’s world turned over.

*~*

“What...” Elizabeth said, numbly, no words coming.

Three years ago, Polly’s little sister Betty, Elizabeth’s best friend, had died in a riding accident on her family’s estate. Elizabeth had cried for weeks. 

And now Betty was sitting across from her; skinnier, taller, and wearing men’s clothing, but still distinctly Betty, with her laugh-crinkles and elfin chin and sparkling blue eyes. She held Betty’s hands in hers, and still she couldn’t take it all in.

“We don’t have much time,” Betty said, pressing her hands. “Polly’s going to create a distraction if your mother or Sherborne comes looking for you, but there’s only so much she can do, even if she pretends the baby is coming.” 

“You’re alive,” Elizabeth said, which was obviously – if incredibly – true, but she didn’t seem able to find any other words just yet.

Betty smiled. She still had her dimple. “Yes. It’s a long story. I was kidnapped by highwaymen, who realized they had a prize and knew they could get a ransom out of my father.”

“Did he pay it?” 

Betty shrugged, an elegantly casual one-shoulder gesture. “He paid. They released me. But it took two days, and my father didn’t believe me when I said they hadn’t touched me. He wanted to marry me off immediately, like dirty goods.”

Everyone knew what that was like. It happened rarely, but every few seasons, a young debutante was seduced by her singing master or her riding groom, and had to marry quickly and below her status. Or so the rumors went. 

“You know I was never one for marrying anyway,” Betty said, her voice deceptively light, “and I didn’t like being strong-armed into it at seventeen, to a man more than twice my age, who thought he was buying damaged goods. So I ran away.”

“You ran away?” Elizabeth asked, her voice breaking. 

So many nights she’d lain awake, listening to the snoring of her maid in the next room, thinking of how she could take her jewels and go out the window, fleeing her old life for the one she’d dreamed of. But she knew nothing of the world out there, nothing more than piano lessons and dressmaker’s fittings and dancing until dawn; she didn’t have a friend in the world who she could have gone to, if she left her world behind.

And Betty had done it at seventeen.

“Polly helped me,” Betty said, smiling. “She was a newlywed, but she’s always had Portland wrapped around her finger. I think he looked the other way, or at least didn’t want to know why his bride spent so much time below-stairs, or why his newest scullery maid was all thumbs at peeling potatoes. Papa reported me dead, of course, rather than let people know I’d run away, and jeopardize Sally’s season. And eventually I set out on my own.”

Elizabeth hoped she was safe, that ‘set out on my own’ wasn’t a euphemism for prostitution. Gently-reared young women weren’t supposed to know of such things, but she knew that it was a dangerous trade, and that few in it reached their thirtieth birthday. “Can I help you?”

Betty laughed, and squeezed Elizabeth’s hand. “Goose. I’ve come to help you.”

Even though she didn’t know what Betty meant, Elizabeth’s heart gave a traitorous leap. “Help me? I don’t know what you…”

“Sherborne,” Betty said, interrupting her, as dearly imperious as ever. “He’s bad news. And I know you’re not the marrying type either.”

She waited; waiting perhaps for Elizabeth to deny it, to say that they had only been children, funning as children do; waiting for Elizabeth to say that it was all imagination, all play, that the kisses under the elm were not Betty-and-Beth, but Robin-Hood-and-Marian, Ivanhoe-and-Rebecca. 

Elizabeth looked into her eyes, and said none of that.

“So,” Betty said, her cheeks rosy in the light of the lamp, “I’ve come to steal you.”

“Steal me?” Elizabeth asked, startled into a laugh.

Betty stood up, relinquishing Elizabeth’s hands in order to stand at attention. “Perhaps I should’ve introduced myself earlier. My lady, I am the Dorset Bandit, and I am here to steal the highest treasure in the land.”

For a moment, Elizabeth didn’t know what to say. 

Then she pulled Sherborne’s rose out of her hair, dropped it on the ground, and stood up to grind it under her heel.

“Well done,” Betty said – and Elizabeth took two steps forward, and kissed her.

*~*

“Much as I would like to continue this,” Betty said against her lips some time later, “we are unfortunately short on time.”

“What’s the plan?” Elizabeth asked, stealing a last kiss. 

“I have a change of clothes for you,” Betty said. “And then it’s out the door and into the anonymous streets of London. I’ve left my curricle with a colleague; we can be away within the hour.”

“Am I to be a Dorset Bandit too?” Elizabeth asked, running a thumb along Betty’s lip, watching the way it made her shudder. “Or shall I be your wife and keep your home? I warn you that I can’t cook.”

She had never seen herself as the marrying type; but she found that she could see herself at Betty’s side, in sickness and in health, in danger and in peace.

“Neither,” Betty said, her eyes soft. “I’m retiring. I’ve put away enough so that we can travel the world, just as we always dreamed. If you still fancy it?”

Later, Elizabeth thought she would have to sit down and have a little cry, because this was all so overwhelming and new and sudden. And yet she also felt as if she was a songbird who had found her cage door suddenly open, and a whole new world suddenly spreading beneath her wings.

“I still fancy it,” she said, resting their foreheads together, the air alight with all that was not said.

Then, as a thought took her, she added, “But there’s something I want to do first.”

*~*

“I will tell you,” Betty said, her short curls bouncing in the wind, “that when I imagined us eloping, I didn’t imagine us taking a hound.”

Jasper slept at their feet. He was quite an effective foot-warmer, as it happened, and he seemed quite incurious about the reasons behind his kidnapping from his fireside. As long as he was with his beloved young mistress, he was content. 

Elizabeth knew the feeling. “Jasper’s mine,” she said, resting her head on Betty’s shoulder, feeling the bunch of muscles as Betty held the reins, rocking gently with the motion of the curricle. “And so are you.”

So were Dolly Parker’s rubies, and Timothy Cavendish’s emerald-studded walking stick, and Mary Bayley’s diamond tiara. So was her mother’s jewelry box, and five of Elizabeth’s favorite frocks, and her father’s maps of India. 

Miles behind them, Sherborne’s crushed rose sat waiting for her parents on the center of Elizabeth’s bed.

“You make quite the bandit,” Betty told her, pressing a kiss to the top of her hair.

Elizabeth closed her eyes, letting herself drift off into sleep, safe and at peace. “I learned from the best,” she murmured.


End file.
